Simple Girl Mode
by going by me
Summary: "Maybe a simple girl never would have been put with a scalpel alone in an abandoned O.R., but she would never have managed to pull it off either." Cristina reflects on how her childhood trauma has affected how she deals with the aftermath of the shooting


_A/N – I'm usually not writing Cristina, but I've had a little seed to idea of a story for her for a while now, mainly triggered by what she says to Owen in season 5: 'I'm the sad girl with no friends'. This is set in the end of episode 7.12, where Owen comes home and Cristina serves him a Happy Heart cereals dinner. In this story, the main focus is about what happened to her when her father died and what that means to her now that she has to work through her feelings from the shootings. I hope I managed to capture Cristina in a true manner and that you'll enjoy reading. I'll be very happy for a response!_

She's despised simple girls even since she was old enough to recognize them. She's felt sorry for false blondes with fake tans and long legs who all think that they are so unique. She's been glad to have been born Cristina Yang, she really has. It's just that... the gun? Nobody would ever find a a reason to hold a gun to a simple girl. So for a while, that's what she wanted to be.

She kicks off her shoes and curls up on the couch, dragging her light brown zip hoodie over her head. She leans back, not at all concerned that the apartment is only softly lit and that she's alone. She no longer sits tense when Owen busts through the door and she never knew there could be such things to be grateful for. The memories are still there, but tonight she doesn't fight them like she's done ever since they started popping to the surface, courtesy of Gary Clark.

She's been back in the O.R., performing a solo surgery she's only done before in her dreams, only with the evil twist of a gun against her head. She's been in her bedroom, waking up with a strange grip around her neck. She's been a pregnant intern, collapsing in Burke's O.R. She's been at her senior prom, ready to strangle both her mother and the pathetic excuse for a boy barfing all over her dress. She's been in elementary school, waiting for her father to pick her up after school...

She was sitting on the top of the low wall surrounding the school yard playground, impatiently swinging her legs over the edge when he finally saw his car turn up. Other children were playing on the lopsided metal swings or the lime green monkey bars, but she'd never been good at dealing with other kids. She just hated sharing her stuff with them and she didn't care at all that her teachers kept telling her parents that she should try harder.

"Can I sit in the front seat?" She threw in her schoolbag in the backseat and looked expectantly at him.

"Yes, when you get older," he replied, just like always.

She sighed and stepped in the backseat and closed the door. "I got A on my spelling test," she tried. "Isn't that worth sitting in the front?"

"Nice try," her father said, blinking at her in his rear-view mirror. "But you still have to wait until you're old enough. Buckle up back there."

She sat quietly in the backseat while her father concentrated on fighting the Friday afternoon traffic. Even if she did that often, mainly because people talked about such boring things that she almost never had anything to say, he was about the only one with whom she felt comfortable with silence. Neither of them was very talkative even at their best, not like her mother who talked endlessly about unbelievable stupid subjects like decorations and dinner parties and how Cristina must make more efforts to make friends at school. As if she ever wanted to be friends with those girls in fluffy dresses and sleek ponytails, with constant chatter and silly games.

"Cristina?" her father suddenly said, interrupting her thoughts.

That was another thing about her father that she liked a lot. He always said her name. Unlike her mother, he never called her honey, or sugar, or baby, or any of those condescending words that she had never understood why people used.

"Yeah?"

"Congratulations on your test. I'm proud of you."

She knew he was. He'd been the one to sit with her as she struggled to stop mixing letters that looked like mirror images of each other or to get through beginner's text sections without stumbling, not hiding his enthusiasm whenever she read a word without effort.

She didn't really try so hard to learn all of that for anyone to be proud of her. She just did it, because she hated not being the best. In all other aspects, school bored her because it was too easy. But if she cared about what anyone in this world thought about her, it was her father.

"Lot of traffic today," he remarked and she leaned forward to look through the windshield.

There were indeed a lot of cars on the highway. Her father had to drive slowly, stopping now and then to wait for the other cars to move. He was frowning and kept looking to his left. He'd put his blinkers on, but no one seemed willing to let him in at that side.

"Damn idiots," he muttered and she stifled a giggle. Her mother would raise her eyebrows very high right now if she'd been there. Cristina never bothered to tell her that her father had no reservations for swearing in front of her whenever he felt the need to.

"There," she called when she suddenly saw an opening between a red and a black car.

"Good catch," her father said and caught her eye in the rear-view mirror just before he steered the car onto the left lane and the world erupted in an explosion of sounds.

She was shoved to the right as the car jolted and seemed to slide over the lanes without really knowing in which direction to go. The back-rear sort of turned counter-wise and for a split second she saw cars and people go by like how they did when she rode the carousel at Disney Land the summer before last.

She felt her seatbelt snap just as her head slammed into her right-side window and the sun-streaked palms at the side of the highway and the gleam of the metal from all the thousand cars around her disappeared for a while. She could hear them, though. Impatient horns signaled, almost how it could sound when everybody tried to tune their instruments at the same time at school band practice.

"Damn road hogs," a male voice bellowed somewhere to her right.

She heard a child's cries and a woman talking comfortingly to it, but it was as if all those voices didn't have anything to do with her at all. But then that black film over her eyes was pulled away and someone was working frantically next to her, unbuckling her belt and pressing down their hands all over her.

"Can you hear me?"

The man's urgent words echoed strangely in her ears, but she squirmed away from his hands and tried to swing her legs over the car's door frame to get out. Her left leg didn't want to cooperate though. Looking down, she saw a cut from just underneath her knee down to her ancle. Blood was pulsating out of it but even though she felt its sharp pain, it didn't bother her. With an effort, she climbed out of the car anyway and looked around.

"Hey," the man said, only just now spotting her wound. "You shouldn't stand up. Sit back and I'll find a first aid kit for you."

The car had came to a halt in the middle of the lane, but it stood with its nose against the left lane, not straight ahead. Several cars had stopped around them, which made the traffic almost totally blocked for cars in any lane. The windows on the other side of the car were both smashed and it almost looked like someone had carefully strewn glass sherds around the backseat.

She limped around the car, her father the only thing on her mind. Ignoring the calls from the man that had helped her, she dragged her left leg all the way to the driver's seat. The door was all buckled in, but someone had managed to pry it open. There were three men already, gathered around her father on the ground. His legs were still in the car, not really touching the pedals anymore since he was lying on his back outside of it.

"I don't want to move him," the larger of the men said to the others. "We don't know his injuries."

She pushed through all of them and fell down to her knees next to her father.

"Hey, kid," the large man called. "I don't think you should be here." He tried to grab her shoulders, but she turned around and let out a high-pitched wail that made him flinch and let go of her.

"Let her be, Paul," a man with black beard said. "It's too late, she's seen him anyway. It could be... you know..."

She tried to ignore what she was pretty sure that he meant by those last words and looked back at her father. The third man was down on his knees, too, with his mouth to her father's, blowing air into him with steady breaths. She could still see the rest of his face. His eyes were almost closed, but not quite. Like he was having a vivid dream and could open them at any minute. His face was paler than she'd ever seen it before and she was surprised over that an Asian man could have that much white in him.

His strange position – head down and feet somewhat up – had made his chest twist in a peculiar way. It was like he'd tried to curl up on his right side, but failed halfway. His shirt was torn open and no longer light blue like it had started out and she almost couldn't tell what was his chest and what was the shirt through all the blood. She put her hands over where it seemed to be pouring the most, so it wouldn't bleed so much. She felt his heart beat against her.

The man kneeling at her father's face sent her a looked that she wasn't sure how to interpret.

"We've called an ambulance," he told her. Nothing else.

They worked on in silence. Every time someone tried to speak to her, reason with her or convince her that someone else should take over, she let out that high-pitched wail and after a while, they let her be. She closed her eyes, pressing harder down around her father's chest and tried all she could to block out any other thoughts than at anytime now, her father would open his eyes and look at her. He would ask her what had happened. And although she wasn't sure exactly, she would tell him, because that would have been what he'd done for her. He always told her everything because he knew she was strong enough to hear it. And he wouldn't cry, so she angrily fought back the scared whimpers in the back of her throat and the hot tears that lingered behind her eyes.

She saw fingertips against his neck. She saw the metallic, not-so-shiny-anymore frame of the other car just behind her. His face, his lips, his chest, the breaths, the blood... everything swirled around her without really getting to her. Not even the sirens piercing through the air made her stir. When the officer that had halted his motorbike among them stepped down, she saw a pair of boots, a pair of fingers against her father's neck and a crash helmet. All those fingers. All those lips. All those breaths. And all for nothing. When the ambulance arrived and she was lifted up from the ground, she didn't protest. She didn't wriggle in the officer's grip. Because she knew that her father's heart had stopped beating.

She'd had to see a shrink. The grief conselour that had sat with her until her mother came to get her – she remembered her as sad, but with a kind of calm demaneour that made her at least bearable – had recommended therapy. Her mother wasn't particularly into that idea. She guessed it wouldn't look good to her dinner pary guests or to the charity organizations she occasionally 'lent a hand' as she called it. So she'd gone back to school only a few days after, as if nothing had happened, only to find that that she now had about a dozen new best friends in her class. They chose her for partner in labs and asked her to play at recess. She obliged, happy for anything to resemble normalcy (even though it really wasn't). Even if she did try to resume her life as she'd known it, vivid images of blood splatter and sharded glass and shallow breaths kept flashing her mind and interrupt her days.

After a couple of weeks of sudden outbursts during class – and her friends account soon back at zero – the school nurse agreed to the grief conselour's assessment. Her mother, at this point either worried about Cristina's psychological state or about how her behavior would look in front of her acquaintances, finally caved in and sent her to a private therapist downtown.

Dr. Jacobs had brown eyes. It was by far her most remarkable feature and had Cristina been asked, she'd never been able to describe her beyond those eyes. She had come to the sessions – one hour twice a week for half a year – with absolutely no interest in talking about what had happened and she'd been able to hold on to that pretty easily. Dr. Jacobs never pressured her to talk. She introduced the thousand and one toys she had in her room and let Cristina choose what to do. She always parked herself at the corner table, reached for a puzzle and made herself busy with it until her hour was up. If Dr. Jacobs asked her questions, she made sure to talk about whatever other things she could think of. What point was there in talking about something that had already happened?

"My dad should have let me sit in the front seat," she'd said once.

"Why do you say that?" Dr. Jacobs had asked but she hadn't replied.

How would she even begin to talk about all these scenarios playing in her head at nights? Versions of that day where she took the impact instead of her father, causing him only a few bruises. Where she saw that other car going way too fast and refrained from pointing out the gap in the traffic, not causing anything to happen at all. Where she too was crushed by metal and hanging in a strange angle from the other side of the car, feeling her own heart stop beating. Because, even if she suspected it herself, what if she actually had to _hear_ that she could have done more?

She never talked to Dr. Jacobs about anything important. But when six months had passed, she'd begun to participate in class again and even though she never really initiated any interaction apart from raising her hand to answer her teacher's questions, she replied when people spoke to her and although her therapist disagreed, her mother chose not to prolong their sessions.

She was grateful. Even though she never said anything herself, Dr. Jacobs kept talking to her. And no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn't completely block her out. She said she knew how scary things must be, but she had no idea. She wasn't in her house with her when the blood stains seemed to appear on her hands again and she had to run to the bathroom and scrub then as clean as she knew how to. She wasn't walking with her down the street in the neighborhood where sirens and honks and scraping brakes could be heard from the highway at any time and she had to sit stiff in the bushes next to the sidewalk for more than half an hour before walking on, no matter how late she knew she would be.

Dr. Jacobs suggested she'd take comfort in something that had belonged to her father, to remind him by. A t-shirt maybe, or a film he liked. She didn't understand. There was no comfort. And no matter how much she tried not to think of her father, because when she did it hurt so much she could hardly breathe, _everything _was a reminder of him. She didn't need a t-shirt.

Her mother didn't get it either. She called Cristina's way of locking herself in for the most time that she was home for ridiculous behavior that didn't belong in the daughter she raised. She didn't get that the cold floor tiles in the bathroom sometimes were the only thing that could get her calm after a day with particularly many memories. She didn't see that her bedroom was the only place where she could control the visual triggers of Dad. She failed to grasp Cristina's irrational, almost panicky, fear of being on her own in the house; a fear that she'd been fighting for months with logical arguments before finally admitting it to herself.

She knew that her mother and her teachers, and well, herself too in some twisted way, all thought that she was okay after therapy. Only thing was, she really hadn't been. But nobody seemed to get that staying after hours had become a necessity for her, because even if she never talked to anyone, she feared being alone. That the reason she worked twice as hard was that her teachers looked at her differently now because to them, she was this wounded, fatherless girl that they felt sorry for and she couldn't hold a encouraging word they said for any truth at all. That the what made her even shorter and more sarcarstic with her classmates as usual was her desperate avoidance to talk about what had happened with anyone. Things just hadn't been going very well.

When she hears steps on the stairs, she stirs from her memories, glad that her heart no longer picks up the rate of a terrified mouse whenever she hears a sudden sound.

"Hey." Owen leans over and kisses her briefly before sitting down next to her and putting her arms around her. "So how did you do today?"

"Hm," she says, pondering the question a little. "Med student screwed me. But I did pretty good." She holds out the box of cereals, the only thing in their kitchen she didn't need to prepare first to eat. "Want some dinner?"

Owen raises an eyebrow, but doesn't look too discouraged. "Hm," he merely says and dips his hand into the box.

She leans into him and goes back to think about her day while Owen browses through today's paper with one hand. She did four surgeries. She also did three yesterday. The one surgery that brought her back wasn't just a temporary relapse. She's really feeling better and she can't describe it any better than what she said to Meredith this morning, because it's really how it is. She's unstoppable. She doesn't have to rack her brain to remember twelve hour surgeries and pounds of tumors or defective hearts, or that little spark in her chest that uses to come with every mention of time in the O.R.

Apart from the few sessions with Perkins, she hasn't seen a shrink this time. She's just tried to slip back into normalcy again and pick up where she left, expecting it to work like last time. Planned on dealing with feelings and crap later. And even then, counted on the strategy that helped her through last time; working even harder, making more effort.

Her whole life, she's thought it a successful strategy. One she's employed at numerous times where many other would have crawled into a corner and licked their wounds. It has helped her. Or so she's thought. Now, though, having spent countless hours at the mall, failed her tentative steps in another profession and sat through painful hours with only water's lapping and her own thoughts as company, she's not so sure anymore.

She will always remember her father's heart stop beating in her hands. Just like she will always remember Gary Clark's gun against her head and that tvinge in her gut knowing that Meredith's happiness was all in her hands. But she also knows that this time, the intense feelings of helplessness and fear will sink away. She will have a scar, but she will not feel the wound pulsating at all times. The instrument tray can clash in the O.R. and she won't fall to the floor. The vivid images of a cracked sternum and Derek's closed eyes or the sounds of Meredith's cries won't puncuate the air whenever she's not ready anymore.

There was a time she wanted to be a simple girl. A strolling-in-the-mall, bartending-bachelor-parties kind of girl. But there was a reason she shunned those girls already as a nine year old and that reason, she's discovered, holds true even more than twenty years later. Simple girls lead boring lives. And maybe a simple girl never would have been put with a scalpel alone in an abandoned O.R., but she would never have managed to pull it off either. And that feeling... it's more than having been capable of a difficult surgery. It's even more than having saved her best friend's husband's life. It's finally having saved a man from bleeding out, and finally letting go of the one she didn't all those years ago. It's having come full circle.

She's not all whole and healed yet. But she's damn well on her way. And she has Owen, who holds her head while she throws up and doesn't let her quit a marriage. She has Meredith, who might react differently to trauma than her, but that in the end of the day is her person anyway. She has Derek, whose mere existence she has been ambivalent for at best, but that were there for her in a way nobody else could. Although she might have been in some points in her life, she's not the sad girl with no friends. And that is not simple.


End file.
